


Not All of My Meta is Depressing: Adventures in helping lonely het fans

by Franzeska



Series: March Meta Matters [24]
Category: Fandom - Fandom
Genre: F/M, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-22
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2021-02-26 15:53:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23305333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Franzeska/pseuds/Franzeska
Summary: Meta on finding Aragorn/Arwen and Harry/Ginny fic in the modern day
Series: March Meta Matters [24]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1664836
Kudos: 4
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> An awful lot of my past meta is the same tedious fights about "why slash" or "think of the het", but every now and then, a commenter comes along who I think is going to be like that, but really, they just want help finding what they like. As someone who's been in fandom since the early 90s, the idea that het is rare is hilarious...
> 
> ...but if you like het from (slightly) older fandoms and you're deeply embedded in the part of Tumblr and AO3 that are all dicks touching all the time, it can seem like no one shares your tastes.
> 
> There are a couple of interesting meta reasons for this. The first big one is that all archives are better for fandoms that started after they were founded. The second big one is that old stuff on AO3 often got there in specific archive imports, and those archives have mostly been m/m ones from an era when het and slash were frequently kept separate.
> 
> There are also some interesting effects where canon het specifically tends to not have as much fanfic fandom longevity because canon provides well, and a new canon that provides the same things is often just around the corner. Less served tastes sometimes produce fandoms that are more aggressive about archiving and preservation or fans who make fanworks for the same ship forever.
> 
> These are two different discussion threads from two different years and two different fandoms, but they represent a very similar problem: As a current fan who wasn't around back then, how _do_ you find the Aragorn/Arwen or the Harry/Ginny? Was it that everyone liked slash instead? Was it that everyone preferred Eowyn or Hermione?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted: December 22, 2017.
> 
> https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/168777348184/fantasychica37-olderthannetfic  
https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/168834011594/fantasychica37-olderthannetfic

> [fantasychica37](https://fantasychica37.tumblr.com/post/160700130136/olderthannetfic-destinationtoast-lierdumoa):
> 
> I JUST WISH I COULD FIND ANY ARAGORN/ARWEN SHIPS (OR INSERT CANON SHIP NAME FROM ANY FANDOM) WHATSOEVER THEY HAVE AS MUCH CHEMISTRY AS ANY OF THE SLASH SHIPS THAT ARE THE WHOLE FANDOM

Wait, were you in LOTR fandom as the movies were coming out? Because I remember there being TONS of Aragorn/Arwen shippers all over the place. If you’re not finding them now, you could just be looking at the wrong fic archive (of which LOTR fandom used to have about 500 with different focuses).

The ship ratios I see on AO3 are really, really different from my experience while the movies were first coming out. (Though Aragorn/Arwen is pretty popular there actually.)

> [fantasychica37](https://fantasychica37.tumblr.com/post/160700130136/olderthannetfic-destinationtoast-lierdumoa):
> 
> I couldn’t find them on FF.net and I didn’t bother on AO3 and I never really read any others and I was born in 1994? If there are still other archives I’d love advice and I’d love advice as to how to sort through the fics that only tag canon ships because the fics are in line with canon and-
> 
> Wait a minute, did you say that the canon heterosexual ship was popular when the LOTR movies were coming out, and wasn’t drowned out by slash?????
> 
> …the Internet has changed so much in the past two decades!!

Forgive me, but I really don’t think it has.

This is an issue of perception and different fandom dynamics more than of any real lack of canon het shippers. Plus fic ≠ all of fandom or all of a character’s popularity. Plus fic that is still online now ≠ all fic that once existed.

The big change in the last two decades is that it’s no longer cool to be openly homophobic, so you don’t get a lot of forums, archives, etc. that openly ban slash. Lots of slash showing up in mixed-pairing spaces _feels_ like slash is overwhelming everything else, but the actual numbers don’t always bear that out, especially when you consider the numerical argument above in this thread.

I’m with you that Arwen/Aragorn had as much chemistry as Aragorn/Legolas, Aragorn/Boromir, yadda yadda, but there are like two billion potential m/m ships in LOTR, so I would expect the baseline of shipping m/m to be pretty high even if people like canon ships, straight ships, and Arwen herself. There were also a lot of fights in the fandom at the time over Arwen being the boring one and Eowyn being awesome vs. calling that attitude out as internalized misogyny. (It was one of those “the popular girl” vs. “the nerdy girl” fights. Or call it “not like the other girls” if you like. You know exactly the stupid fight I’m talking about. Lots of fandoms are still having it today. Arwen was extremely popular in the wider movie audience but possibly not as popular among the specific sort of fans who were writing the fanfic.)

Personally, I do like straight ships, but I rarely like canon ships, and I hated Arwen’s casting back then and disliked the changes from the books. I have since mellowed, but I’d still be more likely to read fic for a non-canon het pairing than a canon one, just because I prefer non-canon ships in my fic. What I’m saying is that there were a lot of factors in people’s interest in Aragorn/Arwen fic above and beyond an interest in slash or a judgment about canonical chemistry.

During the time period we’re talking about, AO3 was founded. And, yes, we struggled a lot against the idea that we were ~all slashers~ and didn’t get other aspects of fandom, but the truth is that many, many of the founders of OTW _were_ slashers. (I wasn’t on the founding Board, but I volunteered from the beginning and was on that crew’s friendslists on Livejournal.) Specifically, we were the wave of slashers who ditched FFN over the “NC-17″ ban and over the prevalence of homophobic trolling and went to Livejournal. That’s why AO3′s comments format looks so much like LJ’s comments format. It’s also why AO3 has such a tendency towards m/m, high ratings, and tagging for specific kinks and triggers. On older spaces, you’re lucky–very lucky–to even get character tags. Tagging for sex and romance-related things and for minutia is something that comes out of slash fandom. Defining “het” as distinct form “gen” or “canon compliant” is also something that comes out of slash fandom–or at least out of slash being seen as mainstream and significant. When looking for a ship like Arwen/Aragorn, you’re struggling against older ways of classifying things. _If it’s got a plot besides romance and is about them, what’s the need for a ship tag?_–would be the thinking in parts of fandom.

Tumblr loves AO3. Tumblr loves a bunch of big action franchises with mostly male casts. It’s easy to have a Tumblr dash that’s all slash all the time… unless you only like Steven Universe… or you’re still fighting the Team Edward vs. Team Jacob fight… Or you spend all your time on Wattpad or FFN instead of AO3. It’s more a question of which fans, fandoms, and fannish spaces we surround ourselves with than of what exists total.

* * *

There’s also another factor: Time.

The LOTR movies came out 2001-2003, and the height of the fandom was during that period. By now, a lot of that fic will have been deleted forever, so whatever is left is the stuff that happened to be posted on a long-running site or that somebody bothered to preserve. And which things people think need preserving and defending are _not_ a random sample. Things that seem “normal” often don’t get preserved because no one is feeling defensive of them. Things that seem embattled and likely to be deleted are more likely to inspire conscious preservation efforts.

In my experience, slash fandom tends to be very concerned with its own history and with making its own spaces where its content is welcome. It tends to be very, very concerned with fic about how the ship got together. Slash fandoms of the past weren’t concerned with whether a pairing would be canon (since it never would), and fans tended to stick with a pairing and fandom for longer after the canon finished. (This has changed in recent years.)

Canon het shippers, meanwhile, are most active right before the ship gets together in canon and tend to move on to a new fandom once canon ends. Sometimes, they write tons of fic, but equally often, the focus is on meta or cosplay or art that sticks close to canon. The big canon het fandoms I’ve been in that have also been big for fic were always ones like The X-Files or Castle where a lot of the fic was ‘how they got together’ stuff written before it actually happened or ‘why does our show suck?’ stuff written after. This is because canon het shippers get a lot more of what they want from canon itself. (Again, this _is_ changing with the times and varies by fandom.)

Back in 2003, many large fandoms also tended to hide on mailing lists or single-fandom archives, and these would be segregated by taste. I wasn’t hugely active in LOTR, so I don’t know what all of the more canon-ish places were. (I mostly read trashy Legolas/orc porn and that kind of thing, which was in _very_ different spaces, not just from the het but from the overwhelming masses of fluffy Aragorn/Legolas. I notice that AO3 has a ton of Gimli/Legolas, which was the big book ship but very much _not_ what was popular at the height of the movie fandom. I remember a ton of complaining about that, actually.)

* * *

As for where to find stuff now, I would dig through the following. 

  * [FFN Aragorn+Arwen+Romance, -Legolas, +English](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fanfiction.net%2Fbook%2FLord-of-the-Rings%2F%3F%26srt%3D1%26g2%3D2%26lan%3D1%26r%3D10%26c1%3D76%26c2%3D80%26_c1%3D78&t=ZmZiMTMxMzllYTA0ZWEyMjcyMTk4OGM4MTI2YWQ5Zjk1ZWMwMTUwZSxpWlFRS2dIWA%3D%3D&b=t%3AF7RptIYdAO86KVsNGkj6aw&p=https%3A%2F%2Folderthannetfic.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F168834011594%2Ffantasychica37-olderthannetfic&m=1)
  * [AO3 Aragorn/Arwen tag](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Farchiveofourown.org%2Ftags%2FAragorn%2520%257C%2520Estel%2As%2AArwen%2520Und%25C3%25B3miel%2Fworks&t=YTA5MDYzYTc1NjE0NTA3YWEyOWJiYmZmNzkzYmZiMjBhMzE5Yzc2NSxpWlFRS2dIWA%3D%3D&b=t%3AF7RptIYdAO86KVsNGkj6aw&p=https%3A%2F%2Folderthannetfic.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F168834011594%2Ffantasychica37-olderthannetfic&m=1)
  * [Fanlore’s page on fic in LOTR fandom](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Ffanlore.org%2Fwiki%2FThe_Lord_of_the_Rings_Fanfiction&t=NTk4MzkyNWNkMWI3NmJjMWIwZjEwOTljNGNjODZkMWM3Y2Q4ZmRkMyxpWlFRS2dIWA%3D%3D&b=t%3AF7RptIYdAO86KVsNGkj6aw&p=https%3A%2F%2Folderthannetfic.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F168834011594%2Ffantasychica37-olderthannetfic&m=1)

I don’t entirely agree with Fanlore’s assertion that there wasn’t much het in this fandom. I just think authors failed to clearly distinguish between gen and het with canon ships. I don’t have any useful advice for easily sorting out those two categories, nor do I have any good advice on how to find the good stuff among the really dreadful badfic. If you want Aragorn/Arwen, you’re going to have to hunt, which sucks, but I just don’t agree that it’s a sign that it wasn’t popular at the time.

I remember all of the women who wanted to get married in Arwen cosplay. It was a Thing like GOT cosplay weddings are a Thing now. Arwen was at least as ubiquitous as Daenerys is now.

The fic I personally remember loving best (aside from trashy porn) didn’t focus on Aragorn/Arwen, but it might amuse you:

[**Who Knackered Aragorn’s Catamite**](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Farchiveofourown.org%2Fworks%2F3852686%2Fchapters%2F8601950&t=ZjU2ODA0ZjE1ODU4MmRhYTRiOWYwYzc0NmU1MGE3NzFlMTQ1OTgyNSxpWlFRS2dIWA%3D%3D&b=t%3AF7RptIYdAO86KVsNGkj6aw&p=https%3A%2F%2Folderthannetfic.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F168834011594%2Ffantasychica37-olderthannetfic&m=1), now on AO3 but formerly on the [Henneth Annûn Story Archive](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Ffanlore.org%2Fwiki%2FHenneth_Ann%25C3%25BBn_Story_Archive&t=MTU2ZDNiYzhiMzY0MzQ3NWI3NTU1ZWNkMWY2MWUxZGI5NzFkMmM5YyxpWlFRS2dIWA%3D%3D&b=t%3AF7RptIYdAO86KVsNGkj6aw&p=https%3A%2F%2Folderthannetfic.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F168834011594%2Ffantasychica37-olderthannetfic&m=1). Notice what Fanlore says about the impetus behind this archive: “_Other non-commercial, high-quality Tolkien archives existed, but most were limited by genre (e.g. slash-only or slash-excluding), by pairing, or to a small group of authors._” (And, yes, I know what the fic is called, but it’s partly about the royal marriage being on the rocks and then recovering.)

* * *

tl;dr - Joining an old fandom requires going on an archeological dig. Good luck!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted: March 15-May 7, 2019.
> 
> https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/183484015424/why-is-drary-so-popular-among-hp-fans-but-not  
https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/183508216479/why-is-drary-so-popular-among-hp-fans-but-not  
https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/183509467169/why-is-drary-so-popular-among-hp-fans-but-not  
https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/183524984199/why-is-drary-so-popular-among-hp-fans-but-not  
https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/183531806259/why-is-drary-so-popular-among-hp-fans-but-not  
https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/184718793319/why-is-drary-so-popular-among-hp-fans-but-not  
https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/183524253204/why-is-drary-so-popular-among-hp-fans-but-not  
https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/183488174099/where-to-find-harryginny  
https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/183488772494/ronharry  
https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/183507539329/where-to-find-harryginny

> Anonymous asked: Why is Drar*y so popular among HP fans but not Hinny? Besides Drar*y, i think second most popular in fandom is Harmion* ship, not Hinny or Romione. So I wonder why canon ship in HP not that popular. As Hinny & Romione shipper, it's really hurt me whenever I read a hurtful comments regarding my ships in facebook, tumblr and ig.

[Cut out someone else's description of how shipping changed over the course of the fandom's history]

This tallies with a lot of my experiences. The only things I’d add are that there was in the past and often still is a huge difference between the posting, content-making, and especially archiving strategies of people shipping mostly slash and people shipping mostly canon-adjacent het. (I say “canon-adjacent” to cover those ships that are pretty obviously being set up but that aren’t canon yet.)

Slash fandom, on average, spends more time defending itself and is more concerned about archiving its works. Canon-ish het fandom, on average, enjoys canon for what it is and moves on when canon closes. HP is a big fandom outlier in many ways, but this trend is a strong one. I wouldn’t be surprised if the obviousness of a Harry/Ginny ending reduced interest in making Harry/Ginny content. (And despite what some people thought, yeah, it was super obvious which ships were endgame.)

On top of slash fandom liking to archive, AO3, in particular, was founded by a bunch of people who like slash and who were catering to that audience. AO3 has been very disproportionately adopted by writers with m/m ships. Naturally, now that it’s big and popular, it has lots of everything, but the m/m slant is noticeable and doesn’t always represent what older fandoms were doing at their height.

HP fandom had a billion different mailing lists, but it was also very much known for _archives_. Different ones had different emphases. The canon-adjacent het ones haven’t necessarily ended up on AO3.

The ships that you list above were definitely big when I was in the fandom, but I also remember many different canon guy/OFC ships being huge. Harry/Hermione was a juggernaut. H/D was and is massive, probably the biggest ship by far, but the various Hermione and Ginny ships were plenty popular in the right circles, much more popular than they look on AO3 now.

* * *

> [booklessremus](https://booklessremus.tumblr.com/post/183498253054/why-is-drary-so-popular-among-hp-fans-but-not):
> 
> As a new person in the fandom here I grateful for this rundown of the fandom’s history…. everything is logical and understandable….
> 
> but are we gonna ignore this?
> 
> 3\. Harry Potter/Severus Snape (11205)
> 
> If anybody can explain this to me… I’d be more than thankful

Hah. I can try, but it really depends on why you’re asking. Cultural differences aren’t easy to explain.

If your question is “Why were problematic pairings popular?”, then the answer is that they’ve always been popular. The idea that hero/villain or age difference is a big deal, much less that it’s “pedo”, is something found mainly in certain circles of Tumblr.

When I was in HP fandom (circa book 3-5), the fans I was around were high school and college students who enjoyed writing dirty fic about student characters they identified with. They paired them with all sorts of characters they found attractive, some of whom were much older. Hermione/McGonagall was a thing too, but it doesn’t have the fic numbers for anyone to notice and get their panties in a bunch now.

If the question is “How can anyone find Snape attractive?”, my answer is first that people find all sorts of incomprehensible characters attractive. But beyond that, around book 3, we didn’t know much about Snape. We knew he treated Harry badly, but he was mysterious. Fanon!Snape of that era didn’t match up well to the things we later found out in canon. In some of the fic, Snape was that dark fuck prince cliche that pops up in all sorts of fandoms. In some, he was a misunderstood woobie. Part of it was thirst for Alan Rickman once the movies started. (If you find Alan Rickman thirst surprising, I’m not sure I can help you.)

Slytherin is endlessly appealing to all of us little wannabe goths. Gryffindor/Slytherin pairings have a lot of dramatic potential. Age difference is hot to a lot of people in fandom, nearly always from the POV of the younger person being hot for teacher. I know tumblr is full of idiots seeing “pedos” under every bush, but this type of fic is basically never about the audience identifying with the older character creeping on the younger one and almost always about identifying with the younger character and wanting someone older and cool to like you back–or about wanting someone hot and powerful to do naughty things to you without you having to lift a finger or tell them what you like.

The main Snape/Hermione mailing list was full of posts by people talking about their memories of teachers they’d had a thing for back in high school. It was that overt and literal! The same crowd also loved those Mary Russell books where the very young audience insert marries Sherlock Holmes. In fact, fanon!Holmes in a shippy context and fanon!Snape of that era share many characteristics.

The people who shipped Harry/Snape rather than Hermione/Snape probably just preferred slash. Both ships were prolific. Many old slash archives have been imported to AO3, so the slash ships will always look bigger. Snape/Hermione and even Snape/OFC were every bit as popular as Snape/Harry.

The Snape thirst was real, yo!

* * *

> [jehnt](http://jehnt.tumblr.com/post/183509152372/why-is-drary-so-popular-among-hp-fans-but-not):
> 
> Another thing to add is that MOST of the big ships got their starts early. The first four books came out a year apart each, then after GoF there was a gap of several years before OotP and that is when fandom really exploded online. Ginny at that point was very much a background character and her only real characterization was as a timid child in CoS. [...]

Truth! You always have to look at the timeline in these situations.

(Wincest instantly started losing ground to Destiel, but it also just stayed behind on LJ in many cases. There’s plenty of fic that didn’t make it to AO3. Same deal with HP.)

* * *

> Also, like @olderthannetfic noticed, for doing any sort of the whole-fandom-sweeping statements, just AO3 stats are not enough. [...]

> # Harry Potter, #fandom, #I will die for methodology, #methodology you cowards!, #that's just the lack of good methodology I saw it in other fields too. we just don't teach good methodology on unis nowadays, #and then I have to suffer academia conferences with the methodology so wrong it shouldn't be allowed in primary school

  * [and then I have to suffer academia conferences with the methodology so wrong it shouldn’t be allowed in primary school](https://filigranka.tumblr.com/tagged/and-then-I-have-to-suffer-academia-conferences-with-the-methodology-so-wrong-it-shouldn%27t-be-allowed-in-primary-school)

Hahaha. I’m dying. Yes, I agree.

I took a stab at getting ship-related stats from FFN. It requires hand-categorizing. This is for all of FFN, but I suspect HP fandom on there looks similar. (Though depending on how you count canon het in plotty stories, something like 1/3 of the het category in this chart could be gen instead.)

Here’s [a writeup](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Ffranzeska.dreamwidth.org%2F2018%2F11%2F28%2F&t=ZThjYzU4OWY2ZjU4MzliZTFmYTFlNTdlNzIwOWQyY2FmYTRmYzVkMCw4aFYxQk51Zg%3D%3D&b=t%3AF7RptIYdAO86KVsNGkj6aw&p=https%3A%2F%2Folderthannetfic.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F183524984199%2Fwhy-is-drary-so-popular-among-hp-fans-but-not&m=1) of where that chart came from, including methodology.

It’s super easy to run the AO3 numbers, so here’s a chart from today (just using the plain numbers, not accounting for any overlap in categories):

* * *

As for anime fandoms, I think the biggest pattern there is that fandoms for pre-AO3 canons have not switched to AO3. Here’s a zoomed-in detail showing AO3 fandom size relative to FFN fandom size.

But naturally, AO3 won’t feel like it’s a big place for anime fandom because here’s what an overall comparison of fic numbers looks like:

(Yes, the Fandom Of Doom is Naruto.)

I’m looking forward to destinationtoast’s analysis of Wattpad.

Between them, Wattpad, FFN, and AO3 are so large compared to old single-fandom archives, that I _do_ think you can say something useful about fandom by only looking at those three. But just looking at AO3 gives a very skewed picture.

* * *

> This is sort of the obsession of mine, I’m aware, but for me, coming from the video game fandom community, it’s striking and a little… alienating is too strong word, but… “closing oneself in a stronghold” feeling… how easily male fandom - which, I think, is still more mainstream image of the fandom, popculture shows us male geeks and nerds in spades - is completely omitted in discussions about fandom on tumblr/journals/Ao3 (and I get it, they’re mostly women spaces, but when one speaks about fandom without this preface “I speak only about XYZ part of the fandom” and yet misses half of it, my formalists heart gets broken) and how e.g. video game modding is often not even acknowledged in such discussion and the legal&economic&social struggles this part of fandom faces - and this is a big and influential part! developers put modding programs in their own software, games publishers, unlike other media, often have quite detailed policy about fan productions etc. it’s almost an industry at this point, which faced its own threats of monetisation etc. - often doesn’t get any reaction from the aforementioned part. Which is a shame, because we can learn from each other, I think.

That’s an interesting point. Part of the problem with talking about “fandom” is that people mean different things by the word itself.

A lot of the time, in this type of community, people mean fanfic fandom _specifically_, and while there are certainly fandoms with notable male fanfic authors, it’s a heavily female space almost everywhere. (My Little Pony might be an exception. IDK. I’m not in that fandom.) A lot of the fandoms that people point to with “more” men have more men than your average AO3 fandom now, but they’re still like 30% of the writers, max. “More” is often used ambiguously, and when you dig into the (shoddy, piecemeal) available numbers, it’s just more than average, not more men than women.

If one takes ‘fandom’ to mean “the group of people who are fans” or even “the group of people who are fans and make things”, then failing to qualify which part you’re talking about is a big problem. If one takes ‘fandom’ to mean “the community that writes fanfic” _by definition_, as a lot of people on Tumblr do, then qualifying is both unnecessary and smacks of “Think of the men!” rhetoric. I think that’s why people so rarely specify.

I see the same thing come up in discussions that have oldschool SF fandom people. They assume that the word ‘fandom’ without qualifiers means WorldCon type literary SF fandom _by definition_, and if you were talking about fanfic, you’d say “Media Fandom”. (Try saying “Media Fandom” to anime fans who write fanfic! Hah!) A few of these SF fans used to pop up making very confused comments about Fanlore because they misunderstood what the actual word ‘fandom’ was being used for there.

Basically, I think that if you asked most of tumblr what kinds of things should be covered under “fan studies” as an academic discipline, you’d get a very different and more inclusive answer, but if you ask about “fandom” sans qualifiers, people–at least people engaging in meta about fanfic fandom–have a definition that is already pretty specific.

If we’re talking about remix and DIY cultures more broadly, there are definitely a number I think are interesting to compare that people usually forget when writing about fanfic. Game modding is certainly one. I’d also include the IF community that makes those amateur text adventure games.

* * *

> [booklessremus](https://booklessremus.tumblr.com/post/184709827474/why-is-drary-so-popular-among-hp-fans-but-not):
> 
> I guess you are correct, I am just a bit surprised because even if I thought about shipping snape with one of his students, it would never be Harry or Hermione.
> 
> I mean their relationship with snape throughout the text did not come off as hate with maybe hidden attraction undertones like for example Harry/Draco or pansy/Hermione… it was just irritating and kinda gross… maybe it would have worked with characters that weren’t as traumatized because of Snape’s actions such as draco or even one of the twins, but that is just my opinion…
> 
> And if I really thought about it, I guess I can blame Alan Rickman…. I mean… mom **likes **him…

Alan Rickman should not be underestimated! ;D

But even before that, people found Snape interesting. One also has to keep in mind that all of these ships–including, let’s be real, H/D–were built largely on fanon, and different people are sensitive to different things in canon.

Many H/D fics of the era started at more or less a pigtail pulling place: Draco was being a dick because he found Harry attractive and didn’t know how to handle it. Vaguely antagonistic snarky coworkers-to-lovers is one common taste in romance novels and romcoms.

Snape fics usually started with him and the other character genuinely not liking each other. Snape/Harry, Snape/Hermione, Snape/Remus, Snape/Sirius (yes, that was a thing): they were all _genuine_ enemies-to-lovers. I know Tumblr likes to conflate these two tropes, but they’re quite different.

Some of the fics started with Snape undercover(ish) and the other character captured by Death Eaters. A lot of them were about another character realizing that there’s much more to Snape than they knew. (Again, remember that around book 3, the audience knew fuckall about Snape.) Snape was often portrayed as a deeply private, intellectual introvert who lacked the looks or social skills to be popular. In Snape/Hermione fic, he was portrayed as a _Man_ who liked _Books_ instead of a _Child_ who liked _Sports_. In Snape/Harry fic, There was also an element of Hermione finally winning over the one teacher she couldn’t make like her. Harry’s interest in Snape often involved Harry learning to care more about things the author cares about and becoming more of an intellectual–or else just more into BDSM. (Ugly guy who turns out to be great at BDSM and thus turns out to be hotter than everyone else is a huge cliche of certain types of erotica.) Snape/Remus was about the two sensitive nerds on opposite sides finally escaping the influence of their bullying friends, while Snape/Sirius followed pretty typical bully/old victim romance tropes.

I think part of the attraction was for very long fic that takes Snape and another character from actually hating and resenting each other to loving each other. That’s an epic change with a lot of conflict built in, so it’s interesting to people. All of these fics were also narratives about getting a second chance, which is hugely iddy.

Fanon Snape was fannish catnip: misunderstood, intellectual, easily irritated by popular jock teenagers, caught in an untenable political situation requiring competence kink and spy shenanigans, deeper and more sensitive than people realized, yadda yadda.

This character has no more to do with canon than Leather Pants Draco does, but he was understandably popular.

* * *

> I am not huge on HP. I enjoyed it, and still occasionally do, but it is not my goto Fandom of Choice. That having been said…I think the fandom and cultural dynamics are more or less universal, well-described here, and utterly fascinating. My question…why no…Humbridge? Probably because when evil characters are too much like real peaple we know, the fantasy aspect of the ship aint nearly as appealing? She would be just as obvious in a fucked up dynamic as Magnussen, but these characters seem to me to have limited appeal except amongst the trademark Dark Writer who is doing personal exorcism..Thoughts?

Mysterious/cool/strange + evil = YES

Banal + evil = DNW

That’s my guess. But also, a lot of the shipping patterns in the fandom got established before or during the “[Three-year summer](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Ffanlore.org%2Fwiki%2FThree-Year_Summer&t=YzI5MTIwODM2YTE0NjY0NDQzZGJkODcwOWQ1YjNiZTk5MDJiNDg4MSw4aFYxQk51Zg%3D%3D&b=t%3AF7RptIYdAO86KVsNGkj6aw&p=https%3A%2F%2Folderthannetfic.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F183524253204%2Fwhy-is-drary-so-popular-among-hp-fans-but-not&m=1)”, as another reblog pointed out. (That’s the gap between when books 4 and 5 were published.) Umbridge shows up in 5. While some characters and things from book 5 on really caught on in the fandom, a lot of the fannish interest was already settled before then.

* * *

### Where to find Harry/Ginny

[wingstocarryon-replies](https://wingstocarryon-replies.tumblr.com/) replied to your post [“Why is Drar*y so popular among HP fans but not Hinny? Besides Drar*y,…”](http://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/183484015424/why-is-drary-so-popular-among-hp-fans-but-not)

> are any of the canon adjacent or het archives still around? where do I look?

[@wingstocarryon-replies](https://tmblr.co/momwhey3hfEnoFwedCYGudQ)

I was thinking of Gryffindor Tower in particular, which is… uh… not still around. MsScribe killed it on her ascent to power. If you haven’t read about that insanity, it’s… impressive. That was one of the strongholds of H/G.

Also, remember that anything of this era will be labeled in a format like “H/G” or maybe something like “H/Hr” where initials are unclear. There might be a cutesy ship name like the “HMS Pumpkin Pie” (Harry/Hermione), though I don’t remember seeing the H/G one, “H.M.S. Orange Crush”, much. You definitely won’t see “Hinny” on old archives. Portmanteaus were not in fashion.

Here is a [Wayback link](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%2F20020611190055%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.gryffindortower.net%2FLibrary%2Flibrary2.htm&t=ZTM5MjYxNTQ5OTAyZGQ1MjNjM2Q5MzU2ZDNiNTJkMWE0MTRjNjlkOCxod0hEeGNtNQ%3D%3D&b=t%3AF7RptIYdAO86KVsNGkj6aw&p=https%3A%2F%2Folderthannetfic.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F183488174099%2Fwhere-to-find-harryginny&m=1) to Gryffindor Tower. Some of the fic is probably still readable this way. Some of these authors probably archived elsewhere as well.

Fiction Alley had a lot of canon-ish fic from what I remember. I’m not sure about Harry/Ginny in particular.

I think your best bet would be to search Fanfiction.net. It was a popular hub all through HP fandom’s height, and it tends to have a lot of het and a lot of canon-ish “gen” with background canon-ish het. The HP section on ffn is also 3-4 TIMES the size of the AO3 one, so even if H/G isn’t the biggest ship there, you can probably find something good if you search for a while.

I don’t know when the HP character filters were added. More recent fic would be findable by searching on Harry and Ginny, but older fic may not be labeled with characters. The pairing feature is much newer, so most fic will not be accurately labeled that way. There are 2k fics with H/G as the pairing and 27k with them as two (of a possible four) leads, which may or may not be shippy. Those fics probably _will_ have them as main characters because of how restricted ffn tagging is. In general, I prefer AO3, but it does make it hard to figure out when canon het is the focus and when it’s only a background ship.

For example, here is a ffn search for [Harry and Ginny with the genre “romance”, in English, minus Draco](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fanfiction.net%2Fbook%2FHarry-Potter%2F%3F%26srt%3D1%26g1%3D2%26lan%3D1%26r%3D10%26c1%3D1%26c2%3D11%26_c1%3D6&t=N2I5YjFjOWI1OWQ0ZDliN2QxZjNhYWM5OTYzMGMxYTk4MDQ4ZmU3ZSxod0hEeGNtNQ%3D%3D&b=t%3AF7RptIYdAO86KVsNGkj6aw&p=https%3A%2F%2Folderthannetfic.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F183488174099%2Fwhere-to-find-harryginny&m=1). I don’t know how many of those 14k fics are H/G, but that is where I’d start looking.

I know we like to rag on FFN, but it was actually pretty awesome back in the day, _especially_ for canon het. Part of why AO3 looks how it does is that the stuff that is big on AO3 (slash, porn) was specifically targeted on FFN.

Anybody have thoughts on where to find Harry/Ginny? What about Hermione/Ron? I don’t remember that being all that popular to write about. FFN would still be my best guess.

ETA: [Here is a list of some HP archives on many different topics](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Ffanlore.org%2Fwiki%2FCategory%3AHarry_Potter_Archives&t=MWU2ODVhYTYxY2JlNjg3ODIxOGY5MjgwMjUwZWQzYzlmY2ZiYWZlMCxod0hEeGNtNQ%3D%3D&b=t%3AF7RptIYdAO86KVsNGkj6aw&p=https%3A%2F%2Folderthannetfic.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F183488174099%2Fwhere-to-find-harryginny&m=1). I’m sure more existed. These are just the ones with fanlore articles.

* * *

### Ron/Harry

[hanktalkin](https://hanktalkin.tumblr.com/) reblogged your post [“Why is Drar*y so popular among HP fans but not Hinny? Besides Drar*y, i think second most popular in fandom is Harmion*…”](https://hanktalkin.tumblr.com/post/183488604019/why-is-drary-so-popular-among-hp-fans-but-not)

[#harry potter](https://tumblr.com/tagged/harry-potter) [#im so glad i was too young to dabble with all this drama](https://tumblr.com/tagged/im-so-glad-i-was-too-young-to-dabble-with-all-this-drama) [#the only time was when my ma would read these to me and she was convinced harry/hermonie was endgame](https://tumblr.com/tagged/the-only-time-was-when-my-ma-would-read-these-to-me-and-she-was-convinced-harry/hermonie-was-endgame) [#but i knew in my heart it was ron/hermonie](https://tumblr.com/tagged/but-i-knew-in-my-heart-it-was-ron/hermonie) [#i often wonder why ron/harry was never a thing](https://tumblr.com/tagged/i-often-wonder-why-ron/harry-was-never-a-thing)

[@hanktalkin](https://tmblr.co/msW3ASuqDWx3ChfWaA_nxeQ)

Because Ron was remarkably unpopular among fic writers relative to his page-time in canon. Ron was my favorite, so this annoyed me constantly. It’s true regardless of het vs. slash or which part of the fandom you were in.

(Ron was plenty popular with the larger population of book readers as far as I can tell, just not as a subject for fic.)

**[Close Enough](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%2F20160622160200%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2Fhelenish.talkoncorners.net%2Fcloseenough.shtml&t=NTQ2NzY2MTIwMmJjNDgxYTUzNmRhODc1OWQzNWQ2ODM2NTQ3YmNiZSxEOExsSHZLaA%3D%3D&b=t%3AF7RptIYdAO86KVsNGkj6aw&p=https%3A%2F%2Folderthannetfic.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F183488772494%2Fronharry&m=1)** by Helenish is my favorite Harry/Ron fic. (Is this up anywhere not on the Wayback machine?)

* * *

Ah hah! Thank you to [@zahri-melitor](https://tmblr.co/mN4a8DALDVVAT1jPUNXpVow) for adding to the other post:

[zahri-melitor](http://zahri-melitor.tumblr.com/)

> “My time is here! None of the old school R/Hr or H/G archives have been imported to AO3. SugarQuill, PhoenixSong, Sink into Your Eyes and The Broom Cupboard are still up, and most people still cross posted at ff.net back in the day, though I’ll admit searching for it is hard.
> 
> Why basically nothing is at AO3? That’s a long story that comes down to ‘two different sections of fandom that didn’t trust each other, With Reason’, plus by the time AO3 came around a lot of the old fandom had already left”

(I will add that “With Reason” means, at least in part, “MsScribe”.)

* * *

> [wingstocarryon](https://wingstocarryon.tumblr.com/post/183504077507/where-to-find-harryginny):
> 
> This is super helpful, thank you!!  
  
I never got into HP fic back in the day because I wasn’t interested in shipping in that fandom, and wasn’t savvy enough to find any other stuff. But finding some canon gen or canon pairings would be fun.  
  
Are there specific places or ways I should look for hurt/comfort? Was it a tag used back then?

Excellent question. It was a _term_ used widely back then. Tagging in the modern sense didn’t exist. Well, on Delicious, the bookmarking site, it did. But fic archives usually just had text summaries (if you were lucky). Even finding pairing metadata is not guaranteed.

If I were you, I would go on ffn and search for a plotty genre like ‘adventure’ and browse the summaries. A text search for “hurt/comfort” or “h/c” might turn something up, but my experience is that even those labels are more common on slash fics or non canon ship fics.

HP had TONS of canonish gen, but it was never well labeled. I’m sure H/G hurt/comfort exists, but it may not be labeled as anything. Extreme labeling is a product of shipping, especially slash, and/or porn websites. AO3’s style of metadata shows very clearly that it was not started by people who wrote canonish gen.

Things that authors saw as an unmarked default back then were, by definition, unmarked. It’s a persistent problem with current fandom meta and for fans wanting to read old gen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oops. This discussion did wander about 72 different places, but I'm including them here because it's hard enough finding all this stuff to upload. Tumblr keeps hiding posts from me if someone in the reblog chain deleted in the meantime.
> 
> I cannot _believe_ that I'd initially forgotten that H/G was one of MsScribe's targets, and that this produces an even bigger cultural gap than just AO3 being m/m-heavy.
> 
> I can only hope that these two fans did eventually find the fic they were looking for!


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